American Illustrator

By Julia Detchon“Grandfathers, puppy dogs, stuff like that,” was Norman Rockwell’s self-effacing description of a 60-year career illustrating the most eventful moments of the American 20th century. And he was right. His hundreds of covers for The Saturday Evening Post (and other popular magazines) were for the most part nostalgic portraits of an America already fading into memory. Some were so sentimental that critics relegated Rockwell to a painter of kitsch: corny sunsets, puppies, Thomas Kinkade. Rockwell, who is the subject of the comprehensive new exhibition Norman Rockwell’s America, opening at the Birmingham Museum of Art September 16, has been described primarily (perhaps pejoratively)
as an “illustrator.” “Indeed, he was perhaps the greatest illustrator in history, but he wasn’t any less an artist,” says Graham C. Boettcher,
the William Cary Hulsey Curator of American Art at the Birmingham Museum of Art. “Behind each of his illustrations is a beautifully rendered oil painting. Rockwell was a highly skilled and extremely versatile painter,” The original oil paintings that accompany their paper reproductions in the show reveal the artist not only as a brilliant composer of subjects and space, but also a sophisticated technician concerned with color and texture, detail and scale.

His knowledge of the Old Master approaches to light and shadow is apparent, for example, in Santa’s Workshop (1922) and Dreams in the Antique Shop (1923), where striking color relationships are carefully calibrated along edges to draw our attention to what’s most important. Other works, such as the 1930 Christmas cover for the Saturday Evening Post, demonstrate an unmatched dexterity as storyteller. Though the single image—of a cold medieval knight peering through the window on a warm holiday feast—operates at a historical remove, its parable about the “haves” and “have-nots” of the holidays surely struck a chord in the
first year of the Depression. The issue was published just four days after Herbert Hoover’s State of the Union address, in which he appealed to the nation’s “definite duty to see that no deserving person in our country suffers from hunger or cold.” The complexity of these works betrays the dismissive labels he has been given: His unabashed affection for the virtues of liberal democracy and the American dream so
overshadowed his technique that he earned the deprecatory descriptor “Rockwellesque.” And yet, traveling Rockwell exhibitions in recent years
have been blockbuster successes (this particular show having shattered attendance records with its debut in England). Rockwell’s kitsch—so square that it has never fit in with the Modernist emphasis seen in major museum exhibitions—has become hip. Is it the safe distance
of 50 years that affords us a measure of irony as we look at Rockwell’s
work? When Andy Warhol elevated Campbell’s soup cans into art, Pop artists so thoroughly erased the boundary between high and low culture that now, pretty much anything seems acceptable as Art. Is Rockwell’s art so middlebrow, so normal, so “bad” that it’s “good?” Or does the popularity of a Rockwell exhibition reflect a genuine popular nostalgia for a truly Edenic America that has never existed? “As Norman Rockwell sought to ‘tell a whole story with a single image,’ this immense collection of deeply sentimental images—from cheerful families around the dinner table to weary soldiers returning from war —tells a heartfelt narrative of American optimism, trust, and enshrined values,” says Birmingham Museum of Art R. Hugh Daniel Director Gail Andrews. “We are proudly presenting this exhibition during a most poignant time, not only over the holiday season but amidst a presidential election. We hope
this exhibition will inspire feelings of unity and pride, reminding us all what is truly enviable about being American.” Indeed, the jokes and allusions of a Rockwell—“a whole story in a single image”—are fun, tidily packaged, and easily digestible for everyone. During this
contentious political season, and amid seemingly insurmountable cultural divisions, it is hard to resist the reassuring experience of seeing, so simply, how we have overcome these problems in the past. Standing in front of a Rockwell, you don’t need to contemplate angst or anomie or even immigration or “the economy.” He has painted over these issues with such a sincere wink that it is easy to forget how much of our remarkable history he left out. Now, even as we interpret his paintings with a more ironic wink, we can still appreciate the purity of
those values he preached—compassion, patriotism, loyalty, justice, freedom from want, freedom of worship, freedom of speech—and how precious those values remain. ”